Today I began a new collection--2009.634, from an anonymous donor with literally no information or collection name in the collection record. It's comprised of 9 photographs, an object, and reams of letters currently lumped under a single accession number that I will need to separate out into individual accessions. Luckily the series description for the letters explains that these are the correspondences between one Connie of New Orleans and five different servicemen during WWII.
I began my work by fleshing out the collection record description, giving it a title, and set about cleaning up the item records for the photographs. For these, I needed to refer to the head of digitization, Lowell Bassett. Per his instructions, for a photo item record I needed to input the format and size, then clean the descriptions of text stragglers from the old Filemaker Pro, and finally selecting and linking local subject headings from the museum's custom thesaurus, topical subject headings from LoC's Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, and geographical subjects from Getty. They were mostly of the same subject, so I was able to ditto many of the fields. I do enjoy picking terms from the TGM, almost as much as writing letter summaries (for interesting letters).
The two folders holding the collection need a few notes to determine the accession numbers of the letters--each gentleman's (and other sorts) letters are consigned to their own subfolder, labeled A-G based on their chronological relation to one another. Because the series D and E are so much larger, their subfolders have been assigned to folder #2, and everything else is stored in folder #1. This means that once I've gotten the items records through subfolder C done, I stop with folder #1 and then resume my numbering with D in folder #2. The when I finish through the end of E, I go back to folder #1 and continue with subfolder F--whee!
Connie's letters represent a diverse set of servicemen from New Orleans, making her collection a unique window into New Orleanians who participated in WWII. There are five of them total, from both the Army and the Navy. They all appear to have been in dating relationships of varying degrees with her, in close succession. All are colorful and articulate, and two write many of their letters admittedly drunk...tres New Orleans. This ability to connect with the past really emphasizes the importance of archives for me, even if the information they hold can be staggeringly large. As a single person doing item level records, the people I read about have had at least one more chance to be marveled at and remembered, long after they are gone. Hopefully these item records will extend them many more chances once made publicly available on the Internet.
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